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How to locate more quality items using Google

Have you ever been shopping on Second Life marketplace only to not find the right item? You want to find a quality item, but the items you’ve looked at so far have zero reviews. The search engine built into the marketplace has limited filtering abilities. Fortunately, there is another method to find what you need.

Google can search the marketplace by adding the syntax site:websitename after search terms. For example, the following search term on marketplace returned around 71000 items while logged in and including all maturity levels.

Halloween

The following search terms at Google returned more than 89000 items.

Halloween site:marketplace.secondlife.com

You can take advantage of Google’s filtering to exclude specific words. For example, the following search terms on marketplace returned 3700 items.

Halloween -skeletons

Every item returned contains a variation of the word “skeleton” even though a minus sign means to exclude that word. The following search on Google returned 88000 items with none containing the word “skeleton”.

Halloween -skeletons site:marketplace.secondlife.com

The marketplace allows sorting results by “Rating: High to Low”, however this still returns fewer results than Google. Using Google to search marketplace with the following text returned 53000 items all having at least one review because it excludes items with zero reviews.

Halloween -“Reviews (0)” site:marketplace.secondlife.com

The same techniques can search most web sites including discussion forums, online shopping, and blogs. Speaking of blogs, to receive notices of updates to this blog please click the SignMeUp! button at the left side of the screen.